The Essence of Spirituality — About Transformation and Finding Your True Self
Ponder the Yonder. Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash.
(If you have Medium membership you can also read this article here.)
I’ve attempted to write this piece in different ways and I will share other approaches to later on. As it is commonly said, there can be many paths to climb the same mountain. But in one moment of inspiration, I wrote this version to describe the essence of spirituality from my perspective.
I believe it encompasses a good but brief summary of the knowledge and insight I gathered over the last time. Hope it inspires and helps you remember your essence too.
The goal of spirituality is to realize that you and the world are both fully divine and that there is no separation beyond the perception of the mind, the five-sense-reality that you are experiencing right now.
Instead of being in conflict and fear of the outer world and other people, we can recognize them as parts of ourselves, different expressions of the same source. This realization eventually enables access to a participatory approach to life and the world around us.
This is more an experiential truth than an intellectual realization as even when our minds accept this, our bodies and nervous systems may still be programmed for fight and flight. Wounded animals are vigilant as we know and therefore existing trauma often induces other trauma. [1] Therefore, practical work may be necessary to heal the wounds and come into a trusting relationship with the world around.
What will then happen is that we leave behind the mindset of fear, the idea that we have to be afraid of each other and thus have to fight for our survival. When we are able to do that, we discover that instead of trying to create win-lose situations in which competition is the dominating force, we will be able to establish a win-win situation in which cooperation with mutual respect and benevolence may be created.
This is just the logical consequence once we accept that we are literally hurting each other and ourselves through our distrust and fear. Game theory has long proven that while distrust and defection are the safe bet, trust and cooperation lead to much higher results on both sides.[2]
The main objective then is to collectively overcome the stage of distrust and go from competition to cooperation as only then the highest potential for the individual and the group can be reached.
Thus, we have to do two things, heal the (individual and collective) traumas of our past, as well as create a (individual and collective) vision for the future that can function as an attracting force, which enables us to see and understand why we have to go beyond our own fear and beyond self-serving short-sightedness.
This may help us to create with love, joy, and inspiration a future we have consciously chosen.
The Path of the Heart
An important step on this path is to move from the dominance of the mind to the dominance of the heart when it comes to interpreting, seeing, and deciding in our lives. It may sound like a strange thing to say for some, but our heart does indeed have access to a lot of insight and wisdom which can lead us to an entirely different mode of being.
It is not that the mind is in itself bad, but that its guiding principle is differentiation and separation, thus it will generally see differences and make rational calculations based on those. The mind is like a sharp knife and even if you just trying to hug someone, holding a knife you may end up hurting them.
The heart does not divide but brings together. It may lack the sharp reasoning and differentiation, instead it holds infinite empathy, compassion, and love. Again, it’s hard to describe or understand without experiencing it. But maybe you know these moments in which your heart is literally warmed up, when someone’s words or deeds let you feel deep empathy or compassion. This is how it could be all the time.
Although the “way of the heart” may not be part of the “mainstream” of many religions and religious groups anymore, it often was essential in their original doctrine. In Christianity we see this quite strongly with the central idea of “love thy neighboor” (which is too often forgotten today) and in Buddhism with the practise of Meta (loving kindness meditation). In Islam the idea of the heart also has a central role and is descrobed in the Quran as a source of divine revelation (or knowledge) and of goodness. [3]
A man in search for Sophia, true wisdom. Emblem 42, Atalanta Fugiens.
Finding and Realising the Divine Within
The goal of many spiritual traditions has been to recognize and realize the divine spark within us. Some may call it the soul, or brahman, or our Buddha-nature, our higher self, C.G. Jung called it the archetype of the self, and Plato called it our Daimon (in the myth or Er), we could also refer to it as the essence or core of our being.[4] In Zen-Buddhism they ask, “What was your original face before you were born?”
This is it.
This is who you truly are beyond the limitations of time and space, and who you can truly be when you let go of all the conditioning and trauma. This is also, why you don’t need to change anything to find authentic expression and live according to your soul’s plan. It is like Michelangelo who, after sculpting the famous statue of Raphael, said that he couldn’t have created anything that wasn’t there already. He simply had to take away everything that was not it, that did not belong to the essence of what he was creating.
If the concept of soul or higher self (etc.) is too much out there for you, try (and learn) to listen to your intuition and to follow your inspiration. They can lead the way for you.
Recognizing (accepting its existence) and establishing contact (intentionally asking for guidance and support) with our essence/ our soul/ our daimon are often the first steps to a deep process in which the original everyday self begins to transform. We may start to shed layer after layer as if we were peeling an onion.
Solve et coagula, separation, and re-unification.
Transformation
In alchemy one of the central ideas regarding personal transformation and the path to illumination is the concept of solve et coagula, separation, and re-unification.
The old needs to be dissolved before the new can be created. [5] This lies at the heart of any true transformational process. Joseph Campbell similarly described this process in his Hero’s Journey as a cycle of separation — purification — return. [6]
All processes of true transformation follow this archetypal structure. It is engrained in many rites of passage and it constantly reappears in different types of psychedelic experiences.
First death, then rebirth. Each death is a shedding of another layer, another step closer to the core of our being.
The concept of the dark night of the soul Jung talked about encompasses this idea and the first step of transformation very well. The archetype of the wounded healer, who has to go through trials and hardship to grow and learn before bringing back what he learned on his journey to his community, is another great example (commonly connected to the shamanic path).
As Jung beautifully phrased it : “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.”[7]
It ain’t always pleasant but it will certainly be worth it.
Thus, the spiritual path is one of finding authentic expression, it’s about becoming you can truly be (the individual journey) and then bringing this gift to the world and those around you (the collective mission) to help others thrive and grow as well.
[1] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2019. Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No or The Myth of Normal.
[2 ] Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, 1984.
Smith, D., Prisoner’s Dilemma and Cooperation, 2019.
Hall, K., Cooperation Among Nonchimpanzee, Nonhuman Primates, 2021.
[3] c.f. Quran 26:192–194, Quran 39:23, Quran 9:77 or Quran 22:46.
[4] For a Jungian approach to this integrating Plato’s myth of Er (found at the end of the Republic) see James Hillman, The Soul’s Code. In Search for Character and Calling, 1997.
[5] c.f. Jeffrey Raff, Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, p. XXif.
[6] c.f. Joseph Campbell, A Hero With a Thousand Faces, p. 19, 1949.
[7] C.G. Jung, Chapter 5 of Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951.
